Anna Klein worries that her fantasies of running away to the remote corners of the world may be a familial urge to isolate herself, the same way her father did...a tendency that ultimately contributed to his early death.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

In this video episode of Here Be Monsters, Jeff shares his special spell of repulsion for astral energy vampires that are draining humans of their life force en masse.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Here Be Monsters is almost 100 episodes old. It’s grown a lot since Jeff was a scared 22 year old learning audio editing in his basement. So as we approach the milestone, we take a look back, check in with some of our memorable guests, and take the chance to answer some listener questions while we’re at it.…

Not all migratory bats migrate. We don’t know why some choose to stay behind at their summer roosts. But according to the University of Washington’s Sharlene Santana, the bats that stay tend to die.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

In this episode Divya carries a recorder with her while as she slowly disassembles a deceased pet parrot: snipping joints, scooping brains, removing eyes, separating the skin from the body.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Robert Larson searches for missing people with his dog Captain Dexter as a K9 search and rescue volunteer. He’s not certified to do this work by any professional agency. He says that he has to work alone to do his best work, outside of the red tape of official search and rescue teams and law enforcement agencies.…

A riptide recently pulled Ariana into open water off the shore of Santa Monica. She thinks it’s her closest brush with death thus far. A lifeguard rescued her. The are different kinds of panics, some more helpful than others.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

After dedicating thirty years to the Church of Jesus Christ, Ashley Fryer put down her beloved scriptures unsure what to do with relics of a religion she no longer believed in. This episode follows her journey of spiritual discovery.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

HBM085: Ascended Fiction got us thinking about hidden knowledge, and whether it's moral to withhold information. So in this follow-up episode, we delve into that more, but this time with Christianity.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

There's a full reconstruction of L. Ron Hubbard's office in every church of Scientology rumored to be more than a traditional way of honoring the memory of the founder. It might be needed by the author upon his alleged reincarnation and return to earth.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Chrissy was having trouble remembering who she was when she woke up. First she thought it was early-onset dementia, then she thought it was schizophrenia. She had recurring hallucinations about being stalked by a beast that would talk to her while she slept.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Shortwave enthusiast John Barner and his friends had found a number station believed to be a form of espionage where intelligence agencies broadcast encrypted messages to field operatives.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

On a hot summer day in 2014, HBM host Jeff Emtman received a bit of amateur, backyard surgery from a fish biologist. It was for the KCRW 24 Hour Radio Race. which is a one day radio contest now in its fifth year. The race gives contestants 24 hours to record, edit and publish the most interesting radio story they can find. The 2017 24 Hour Radi ...…

She's good at it, she makes good money, and she generally enjoys her clients’ company. And although her job rarely gives her sexual pleasure, Remi Dun enjoys her job. Please Note: This episode is about sex. And there’s swearing.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Devaan describes it as a pulsing, tingling feeling on the back of his neck. His preferred stimuli are whispers, shuffling cards, scissors, tapping noises, anything that makes a crisp enough sound to trigger his ASMR. These sounds make him feel relaxed, euphoric and drowsy.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Sagittarius has been good for the last year. That’s what he told us. He told us that the cage that Luna designed for him is working. She controls his money, his businesses, can read his email, can see his bank accounts, and can track the location of his phone. He says that the next time he messes up, Luna will leave him, and take the kids with ...…

Muhammad Tariq's small, gender-integrated school in Panjur had been anonymously receiving literature that scolded them for teaching girls. Tariq and the other teachers didn’t take it seriously until six men with guns showed up. After the incident in his school, Tariq feared for his life; said he needed to get out of Pakistan. So he applied for ...…

Griff was on track when he started to babble around 12 months old. But, unlike other children, the babble never evolved to understandable sentences. In this episode, producer Luke Eldridge (Griff’s father) shares scenes from their home as his family works together to help Griff learn to talk.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Since childhood, Anita Woodley dreamt the future, able to predict imminent murders in her neighborhood. The Rhine Research Center is America’s oldest parapsychology lab and going to the Rhine Center was her doctor’s suggestion. Her doctor said she wasn’t alone, that there were others with her gift.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

There is an unusual piece of carved grey stone in the hills of upstate New York. It depicts the boot of a notorious American villain who was shot in the leg during the Battle of Saratoga. Major General Benedict Arnold’s name is nowhere to be found on the inscription. Instead, it refers only to the "most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army ...…

For the last nine years, Ken Arnold and his wife Donna have operated an all-volunteer group called the Puget Sound Ghost Hunters. They put an ad up on their website and on their Facebook group inviting hunters to join their team. But before Ken and Donna offer membership, they arranged a trial ghost hunt to see how the candidates behave in the ...…

Jacob is the owner of AntLife, a company that makes large ant farms. And during a cave-in, one of his ants became trapped in a small underground cavern, just inches from the surface. Despite his omniscience, he feels unequipped to deal with the ethical decisions required of him.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Growing up Mormon in Montana, Bethany Denton had a phrase drilled into her mind from an early age: “modest is hottest.” But by the time Bethany moved to Washington State for college, she had rejected the church and that’s when she met Helen. She invited Bethany to join her for an all-expenses paid nude vacation, courtesy of an eccentric tech mi ...…

There are about 10,000 files in the Here Be Monsters sound library. On this interstitial episode, Jeff plays back some of these heavily-used sounds and asks whether they occur because of an inherent goodness, a force of habit, or some kind of weird nostalgia he feels for the early days of the podcast.…

The Way The Blood Flows is a short story written and read by Evan Williamson, who currently makes videos and music with his wife Sidra as they travel the world.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Ariadne, Jacqueline, North, and others unnamed are all part of the same system. They share a single body. They take turns “fronting” the body, controlling it. And when they’re not fronting, the system members are free to roam an infinite landscape, a pocket reality that they call the “in-world”.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

When Dylan Wright placed his first Craigslist ad back in 2006, he called himself a “nice and genuine person with waking up problems.” He was looking for someone to help him in the mornings. First it was phone calls, but those didn’t work, so he moved on to something more personal.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Feeling anxiety about the American presidential election, HBM host Jeff Emtman took a trip to a place he hoped to be insulated from politics: PestWorld 2016, the largest American gathering of pest management professionals.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

In his freshman year of high school, Jacob was feeling helpless against his gay attractions. Exasperated, he asked aloud for a demon to come into his body. He figured he was already evil, so he might as well “get something out of it”.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Preparing an animal’s skeleton for display is incredibly labor intensive for human hands. So curators have turned to a family of beetles with millenia of experience.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

Erin was fat as a kid. Since middle school, she tried all different methods to lose weight. From a young age she developed the idea that the most important thing she could do with her life was lose weight.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW, Jeff Emtman).

When he was twelve, Eric Alexander started writing songs as a way to make sense of the confusing world around him. Faced with the prospect of an early death later in his life, he ignored the doctors’ orders fearing the surgery would affect his musical creativity. Instead, Eric decided to focus his energy on creating his masterpiece: Sir Deja Do ...…

Jeff Emtman left home in the summer of 2011 to hitchhike the United States, to see if strangers would chop him up and put him in their trunks, if he gave them the option to.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW).

McNeil Island sits in Washington State's Puget Sound, just three miles northwest of Steilacoom. For the last 150-odd years, McNeil Island has been a place to house society's undesirables. Eventually the island prison closed, but by then McNeil Island had sprouted a different kind of facility, also nested inside razor wire. It wasn't a prison, b ...…

The most notable monster created by Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a massive tentacled being omnipotent, yet completely uncaring that sleeps in the depths of the ocean. Cthulhu, Lovecraft called it --a creature that will one day rise again from its watery home to reclaim the Earth for itself.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW).

It was early in the morning of New Years Day and Kelly had just bought a purse-load of psychedelic mushrooms from Laramie Wyoming's local "druggist." Kelly handed them out to the assembled company and took some himself. He felt a bit apathetic about the world. But when he went outside to look at the stars, he realized what he wanted more than a ...…

Growing up in small-town Montana, Bethany Denton's parents and teachers told her what she knew already: she was brilliant. Bethany couldn't help but feel destined for something big, even though she often skipped her school readings and phoned it in. Why try hard when you already know everything?By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW).

When Lina Misitzis was a teenager, she told people she was dying. She wasn't. But, an entire genre of "dying girl gets the guy" movies taught her that landing a boyfriend required a certain brevity on this planet. She only lied to men, men she wanted to be with.By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW).

All is fair in love and war... even mind games. The United States military employs psychological warfare in nearly every war it's part of. The US Military calls these tactics "Psychological Operations", or "PSYOP".By webmaster@kcrw.org (KCRW).

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